I miss Blastula practicing, too...we're still coping with it...anyway, Mr. Goodvibes followed me up the hall last night at 4 this morning (gig in Galveston ended at 1:30 and we spent an interminable amount of time at a slacker-run Whataburger drive-thru in Dickinson on the way back...then when we got the order, only half of it was there...it took a long time to get it all right. Remind me never to go there again.) I felt somebody behind me, turned around and there stood Mr. Goodvibes, right up in my face. You folks might think I'm crazy. Seeing a ghost and telling about it puts you in a weird light, some people go, "Oh, that guy's on drugs or he's mental" or something. Well, here I am standing in the hall upstairs at 4AM, face-to-face with a ghost. He consists of a kind of atmospheric material. He's visible but transparent, he makes sounds but it's not necessarily something your ear can hear. You hear him in your head. This time he showed up as a black shadow, moving, pulsating, almost like I was looking at him through a tunnel...I got cold. Freezing cold. Chills, goosebumps, I shuddered...that always without fail brings fear into me. I said "I'll deal with you later. Right now I have to get some sleep. Leave me alone." I went into the bedroom and was asleep within a few minutes, it was a 24-hour-long day. I'm thinking about getting in touch with Lone Star Spirits and having them over one of these nights. They might be able to find something out about him. Cheers, WC1
http://www.lonestarspirits.org/index.html

Here it is a year later and I still haven't figured out who or what he is, but last night he showed up and touched me. It was past 3AM, I couldn't sleep, so I was here in the shrine to bad taste, working on the flyer for the Jim Shortt benefit coming up in August. I'm sitting here minding my own business and all of a sudden it got so cold I saw vapors when I exhaled. A deep, hard chill went through me, and then there was a whiff like somebody just walked past behind me. I turned to the left and an ice-cold hand touched my right shoulder and left what felt like ice crystals on my skin. I jumped up and turned around only to see this black silhouette of a person disappear into thin air in the corner of my eye. I turned on the light. Footsteps went up the stairs, the hall floor creaked, and I heard a voice up in the attic. I said "Look. You're really scaring the heck out of me, I wish you'd cool it or I'm going to have to do something about this." The chill in the air remained, I heard stirrings in the walls, floors and attic space. By then it was coming up on 4AM and I made my way back upstairs through that tunnel of death and found my way to bed. I'm almost 60 years old, I'm not crazy and that was a very spooky experience. I am open to suggestions. There's a friggin' ghost in here! Cheers, WC1

I got home a little later than usual last night (gig ended at 11, we got here at 1:45) because while I was sitting in traffic on the way to a gig in Kemah, the points in George's distributor heated up and melted, and the engine died. I had to push George a block and a half, fully loaded with my musical equipment to a cul-de-sac (3 different folks pulled over and offered to help...good people out at NASA), call Sylvester, who luckily was in the same vicinity and he came and got me and we went on and played the gig. Afterwards, we tried starting George but no dice. Sylvester has AAA and he has a free tow on his deal so he called a wrecker and George is now safely back in the driveway...I'm going to get a new ignition chip like cousin Bert told me to do and this won't happen again...also a Bosch Blue Coil. Anyway, a couple of things happened having to do with Mr. Goodvibes. When I got in I went upstairs to change out of the soaking-wet clothes I had on (right now most of our gigs are outside, where it's in the high 90s with high humidity) that had been that way since I pushed George the length of a football field earlier in the heat of the day. I turned on the hall light. When I came back out of the bedroom, the light was off. I turned it back on and went downstairs. I fixed my sandwich and came in here to the shrine to bad taste and as I was eating the sandwich, the light in the hall got turned off. I got up and walked over to the stairs and looked and listened. Nothing. I turned it back on, dammit. I came back over here and sat down and it got turned off again. I was telling Sylvester about the ghost when we were driving home in his car with the wrecker following us, and he said "You said a while back that your house in Galveston had a ghost in it, didn't you..." I said yes, it did. Did I tell you about that? He said "It's the same ghost. He went with you. Did you bring something to your house that came from the old house in Galveston?" I immediately remembered the old turn-of-the-century trunk I've kept that we got out of the attic at our old Victorian house in the historical district in Galveston. I said yeah, the old trunk. It was full of spooky stuff. Black dresses, lace-up shoes with pointy toes and high heels, a metal box that was full of old cigar wrappers and it had a glass eye in it...and books from the 1800s about seances and conjuring spirits...Syl said "That's your boy. You brought him with you." I was struck by not only the immediate response that Sylvester had, but the simplicity of his reasoning. Mr. Goodvibes is mine. He's been with me all my life. I brought him to where he is now. WC1

Mr. Goodvibes makes a very sudden, deep and lasting impression, senor Bandito...
Meeting him is anything but polite; he shows up and introduces himself when you don't expect anything, he does things that at first you just don't even notice on the surface, but then you stop and go..."Uh...wait a minute...I just stepped aside so he could walk past me and it's just me here..." it's the kind of thing where you are doing what's normal and yet it's paranormal at the same time. Then once you are aware that he's around, he starts playing games with you and it's terrifying and fascinating at the same time. I really need to figure him out and find out who, what and why he is here. We've all seen him and he's pulled stunts on us every chance he gets. He hasn't hurt anybody, he just gets in your head and turns the house into some kind of portal...kind of like a real-life spook ride sometimes. It's a nice, pleasant house we live in but late, late at night in the dark when he takes over, it's like being trapped inside a coffin with him. Thanks, guys, WC1